Hacking Reading: How Helsinki’s new library Oodi is doing it with service design and leading indicators
It’s a luscious wet dream for book lovers. Oodi is Helsinki’s new Central Library was opened on last Wednesday, December 5th, a day before Finland’s Independence Day. Newsworthy and noteworthy — a piece in the New York Times covered the story, published on the 6th — , the space defines itself as “as a living room for residents, located right at the heart of Helsinki”.
According to news agency YLE,
Apart from books and other reading materials, Oodi is also equipped with 3D printing gear and sewing machines for creators, rehearsal rooms for musicians, a small cinema and spaces that can be reserved for a variety of uses. There’s also a café as well as the possibility to try out virtual reality technology.
The point is, thus, pretty clear — a space for cohabitation, collaboration, creativity, and of course, for books.
At the same time, in my home country, Brazil, some of the biggest book shop chains are being shut down. It’s not an exclusivity of a miseducated nation: books shops are not the best business to be in around the world, these days. While Brazil has seen the fall of Saraiva Megastores and French book shop Fnac (which, at best, became a music retailer), Barnes & Noble has been struggling with its activities for a while. TechCrunch has reported over 1,800 people laid off in February, to save up to US$ 40M in costs, while the Guardian, in May, has continued to broadcast the slow, constricting devourment of the bookstore chain by Amazon.
Grieving is not the answer
Despite the sad news for book enthusiasts, there’s something to look forward to. It’s striking to see the raise in interest in Audible, Amazon’s audiobook seller, over the past 10 years. Quite recently, the New York Times built a story on audiobooks substituting reading. While eBooks and print books sales have been flat for the past * years, audibook sales have doubled in the past five years.
Audible has been founded in 1995, way before the iPod, yet has become familiar to millions in a curve that significantly correlates to the drop in interest in other companies, like Barnes & Noble. A simple indicator like Google Trends can give us some idea.
Audible has been founded in 1995, way before the iPod, yet has become familiar to millions in a curve that significantly correlates to the drop in interest in other companies, like Barnes & Noble. A simple indicator like Google Trends can give us some idea.
This helps to build a case for us, the readers (or media consumers, or information prosumers, or whichever), stop grieving the end of print books or brick-and-mortar book shopping.
Furthermore, we should stop feeling horribly guilty about this decline. Giving a print book as a Christmas present, unfortunately, will not solve the problem. A fraction of those recipients, yes, may rediscover the pleasure of reading; but truth be told, most of those will become another pile of guilt: “books I haven’t read”, and filling up the line of excuses for “what I haven’t had time to do”. I hate excuses, especially the ones related to “not having the time”. “I haven’t found the time to do it” sounds better — prioritization is an indissociable part of the matter.
It is probably fair to say that most of the time we are at staring at the phone we are reading. Sure, we may be reading all sorts of disposable, superficial information. There are even further problems, such as fake news and biased bubbles we seem to be living in. But overall, we are quite active readers if compared to 10 years ago.
Searches for “how to” videos grow 70% year on year, serving people in what we the marketers call “moments of intent”. That’s of course the significant change: if I want to gain niche knowledge on a specific topic, say, how to build a wooden birdhouse, I can start right away by watching how it’s done, instantly. It’s an obvious difference, but bearing loads of subtlety when it comes to providing services. Isn’t that why, when we discover a new title, we let paper fetish behind and start reading immediately on Kindle?
It’s hard to put in perspective how a habit may change universally — but it is, nonetheless, important to ask, for example, if we tend to give up longform reading for listening. That goes for novels, books or the choice of a podcast episode over a written interview. If the experiences are symbiotic on the long run, remains to be seen. Apparently, we still retain more information from print than audio casts, as the NYT reported from this study on a quiz about a print article and podcast piece, readers scored 81 percent and the listeners 59 percent.
Online reading, too, comes in different shapes and sizes. When assessing the user experience of reading in Kindle, Ellen McCracken came up with the concept of centrifugal and centripetal reading. Some platforms, like YouTube, stimulate users to look outside, on the outskirts of content: related videos, comments, author profile, descriptions, stats etc. Others tend to create a noise-free environment, so users can move deeper into the text. That can be a book in Kindle, but not only; journalism has shown dramatic and absorbing reads in media-rich scapes, too. I’ve quoted her ideas in my doctoral thesis, when I came up with the concept of paramedia, when it comes to decision-making on content consumption, available here.
Change the cause, not the consequence: playing with leading and lagging indicators
In my day to day work, I help people and corporations to find meaning in their customer experience data. It is a daunting task at times, because when there’s too much information available, we tend to analysis paralysis — or plain confusion.
Furthermore, besides finding meaning in customer data, I help companies to find purpose to their data. That’s a more delicate task, as I’m stepping into a territory usually unfamiliar to me — the client’s field of work — with the mission to assess how they can benefit of some information that, currently, is either underground or flying around, like loose numbers.
For both situations, service design is the philosophical and methodological core of what we do: we start from scratch, asking what are the needs of the end user of the service. Situational needs, aspirational needs, contextual needs.
Service design has been, as well, the foundational principles of Oodi’s conceptual architecture:
Oodi has been designed together with the city’s residents so that it can best correspond with the wishes and needs that library users have. Ideas, tips and dreams have been gathered at urban events and workshops, and through websites and various campaigns.
When it comes to the combination of data and processes, my experience has shown me that it’s best to start from scratch. And focus: how is end users’ performance assessed? Which are the leading indicators involved in this performance?
That all sounds very productivity-driven (and it is!), but the framework is quite flexible. In a wearable assessing mood, performance is, for example, “feeling well”. But what leads to that state of well being? That’s when we need to start looking at leading indicators.
And when thinking of assessment, it is important to understand two things: who/what are data producers, and who are the data consumers. The producers are often people running smart devices, but they can be as well references to time, location and general production. The consumers, on the other hand, may or not be the end users — they can be the ones wearing a smartwatch app, but they can also be a manager, and a regional director, a reseller or a global manager.
The point is to streamline more and less complex data in one single language, that can be universally understood, collected, and that will converge to a meaningful output.
That’s a microprocess developed in a gig I’ve conducted in Canada, with a super talented team of service designers and orchestrated by Jane Vita, studio director at Digitalist Vancouver.
Moments and habits
But the most relevant part of the process, as such, is to understand that while most projects focus in measuring lagging indicators, the really powerful measurements are taken from leading indicators. And that’s what Oodi, advertently or not, has done: a strong focus on leading indicators of experience, with potential long-lasting results.
To briefly explain what are leading and lagging indicators, I often use the “getting in shape” example. The most known indicator someone knows for getting in shape, gym results of dieting, is weight. But weight is nothing but a lagging indicator — the results after all the changes you make. If you only step on the scale, you will not lose weight. The leading indicator involved is much harder to track, but easier to affect: it’s what you eat.
Stretching the metaphor a little bit, I’d say most companies obsessively step on the scale to check their weight, but rarely create consistent measurement and policies of what they eat. The thirty-day report may be essential for good bookkeeping, but it surely will not improve the numbers, optimise current affairs, improve customer experience, and much less, disrupt the industry (or avoid and counteract a competitor disruption).
It’s surprisingly hard to measure experiences. And experiences are one essential non-commodity that is for sale today. It’s all part of the economy of membership over ownership (we used to “own records”, and now we simply “listen to music”, provided we have access to Spotify). Last year, I got as a present an experience gift. A blindfolded dinner, watching bears in the wild or kayaking — it’s definitely not about the thing in itself, but taking the dreaming, planning, scheduling stage into account, and the before, the reporting, the social media publishing, the aftertaste.
Who has time for reading, anyway? As stated earlier, with audiobooks eroding eBooks, and eBooks erodis books (also read on a hard-to-focus, centrifugal medium as the pad or phone), what is left of the transcendental art of reading?
Think context, reap outcomes
While book stores close because people will not buy books, because people won’t have make time to read, Helsinki Oodi tackled one of the causes of the problem: the lack of opportunity to really take the time to read a book. Reading is not just the ergodic effort of opening a cover and turning pages. Try doing that with a toddler home watching Peppa Pig, drawing robots and playing with a sticky milk mug. Even after our three-year old tropical storm toddler goes to bed, the gap of solitude between dusk and the next morning just doesn’t feel enough to get immersed in a book.
Experiences are highly contextual. Think of the difference between staring at a painting at home, and the real work at an art museum.
Oodi Library has figured that spending the entire day absorbing culture — books, magazines, comic books, games, film — may be the trigger to better, more active and engaged reading experiences.
“The challenge is to focus on the right ones, get small teams on them, then step back to build skills and come back to the project with a new perspective”, said Albert Hogan, head of group marketing, audience, and digital development at Penguin Random House UK in article for Publisher’s Weekly.
Look, measure, hack
In my daily work, that’s often the crusade. We tend to take things up a. notch. What do our best customers consider our best experience? That’s what author Sean Ellis calls the North Star Metric. We have developed further in making deep, meaningful dives. Dives focus in laser-cut segments of prime customers. Then, reverse-engineering that into metrics for experiences. It’s an art, but it’s a scientifically-driven art.
At this point, probably it all sounds just obvious. Maybe so, maybe too obvious. That’s maybe the reason why book stores all around the world are not getting it. They continue pushing more books into people who may want books, but won’t know how to get to read them.
